Introduction to Cisco Webex Contact Center
Cisco Webex Contact Center is a cloud-native Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution designed to enhance customer interactions by providing smarter, proactive, and personalized engagement across various channels. Here’s an overview of what the product does and its key features:
Core Functionality
- Multichannel Support: Webex Contact Center supports a wide range of interaction channels, including telephony, email, messaging (such as social media channels like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp), and web chat. This allows customers to interact with the contact center through their preferred method.
Key Features
Interaction Management
- The platform manages interactions across all channels, enabling initial handling by the system and escalation to agents when necessary. It includes features like routing treatment based on interaction reasons and queue position, and the ability to transfer interactions between agents or queues.
Agent Desktop and Tools
- The Agent Desktop provides an omnichannel inbox, showing all open conversations and allowing agents to communicate with customers in real-time across multiple channels. Agents can toggle between communication channels, review and accept incoming interactions, and view their recent contact list. The desktop also includes in-conversation capabilities such as sending/receiving attachments, consulting with other users, transferring interactions, and receiving coaching from supervisors.
Supervisory and Administrative Tools
- Supervisors have access to real-time dashboards to monitor performance, including call monitoring, coaching, and barge-in features. Administrators can set up flexible routing strategies, assign multi-skilled agents to queues, and access historical reporting and analytics to track customer trends.
Automation and Workflow
- Webex Contact Center includes a flow builder with a drag-and-drop interface, allowing business users to automate customer interactions. This can start with self-service and escalate to live agents when necessary. The platform also uses a BPM workflow engine for provisioning contact center capabilities, ensuring resilience to failures and data integrity.
Workforce Optimization
- The solution offers workforce management features such as dynamic scheduling, forecasting, and adherence monitoring. Additionally, it includes workforce optimization tools like speech analytics, sentiment analysis, and predictive Net Promoter Score.
Integration and Security
- Webex Contact Center integrates with various customer applications, including leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. It also ensures secure interactions across all channels, including secure chat, email, SMS, and social media messaging.
Reporting and Analytics
- The platform provides comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities through tools like Webex Analyzer. This includes reporting on calls, emails, chats, and social media interactions, as well as historical data to track customer trends and performance metrics.
Customer Engagement
- Features such as proactive chat, self-serve chat templates, branding of the chat bubble, and integration with customer virtual assistants (bots) using Google AI enhance customer engagement. Customers can also download chat transcripts and submit Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.
Architectural Principles
- Cloud-Native: Designed and developed as a cloud-native solution, ensuring scalability and resilience.
- Event-Driven: Services communicate using messaging and REST APIs for specific use cases.
- Stateless/Externalized State: Services are deployed in Kubernetes, running in Docker containers, which allows for automatic scaling and resilience to failures.
In summary, Cisco Webex Contact Center is a robust CCaaS solution that offers a wide array of features to enhance customer interactions, agent productivity, and administrative efficiency, all while ensuring scalability, security, and integration with other business systems.